Whatever appeals to us as the best or most beautiful thought in manufacture we have a right to adopt, but we should study to understand the circumstances of its production, in order to do justice to it and ourselves, since style is evolved from surrounding influences.

It would seem also that its periods and origin should not be too far removed from the interests and ways of our own time, and incongruous with it, because it would be impossible to carry an utterly foreign period or method of thought into all the intimacies of domestic life.

The fad of furnishing different rooms in different periods of art, and in the fashion of nations and peoples whose lives are totally dissimilar, may easily be carried too far, and the spirit of home, and even of beauty, be lost.

Of course this applies to small, and not to grand houses, which are always exceptions to the purely domestic idea.
There are many reasons why one should be in sympathy with what is called the "colonial craze"; not only because colonial days are a part of our history, but because colonial furniture and decorations were derived directly from the best period of English art.

Its original designers were masters who made standards in architectural and pictorial as well as household art.